Tuesday, February 08, 2005

All for One and One for All

Steve Coll of the
Washington Post (hat tip:
Little Green Footballs) was at a conference on the future of nuclear
terrorism at Los Alamos and asked the 60 weapons scientists in attendance to
indicate, by show of hands, who thought a Hiroshima-class attack on the US was
less than 5%. About four did. That doesn't tell us about the
distribution
of the degrees of belief of the rest. But Coll's point is made: the possibility
of a nuclear attack on the US can't be dismissed.

Although Coll admits that Al Qaeda itself is much reduced, he argues
that the sheer proliferation of knowledge has reached the point where a small
band of Islamic professionals, inflamed by the idea of Jihad
can plot and
carry out an attack on their own.

Today al Qaeda is no longer much of an organization, if it can be
called one at all. Its headquarters have been destroyed, its leadership is
scattered or dead or in jail. Osama bin Laden remains the chairman of the
board, increasingly a Donald Trump-like figure -- highly visible, very
talkative, preoccupied by multiple wives, but not very effective at running
things day-to-day. ...

[But] Imagine the faculty lounge in the theoretical physics,
metallurgy and
advanced chemistry departments of an underfunded university in Islamabad or
Rabat or Riyadh or Jakarta. The year is 2015. Into the room walk a group of
colleagues -- seven or eight talented scientists, some religiously
devout, all
increasingly angry about events abroad. At night, between sporadic
electricity
outages, they watch satellite television and chat in cyberspace, absorbing an
increasingly radical, even murderous outlook toward the United
States. By day,
as they sip coffee and smoke furtively in each other's company, these
scientists spontaneously form a bond, and from that bond emerges a resolve to
act -- by launching a nuclear or biological attack on American soil.

Unlike states, which so far have proved deterrable by the threat of
retaliation even when led by madmen, this faculty cell may be utterly
indifferent to and beyond the reach of the traditional mechanisms of nuclear
deterrence.

It is debateable whether al Qaeda was ever deterrable and the
hypothetical Islamic faculty cell would be no different. What the GWOT did was
deter the states which may have considered supplying al Qaeda-like
organizations with the material for building nuclear weapons with the threat of
collective responsibility. Deterrence has always, from its inception,
been based
on this immoral principle and it isn't necessary to approve to recognize it was
the case. For most of the Cold War, opposing nations held each other's civilian
populations hostage. Early delivery systems were too inaccurate to target the
threatening military assets themselves. With the so-called
"counterforce"
strategy unavailable, only "countervalue" was available.
That meant, in effect,
that America was prepared to incinerate every man, woman and child in
the Soviet
Union in response to a nuclear attack. In most Cold War-game scenarios enemy
leaders buried deep in bunkers or circling in command aircraft would
be the last
to die. Some believed they should not be targeted at all in order to preserve a
command structure with which one could negotiate a post-holocaust peace.

To the question 'who might America retaliate against if a shadowy group
detonated nukes in Manhattan' the probable answer is 'against everyone
who might
have stood to gain'. The real strategic effect of the GWOT was been to convince
many states that this would indeed happen to them. That the decline in Al
Qaeda is possibly due to the implicit threat of collective
punishment on the
Islamic world is a sad commentary on human nature. But there it is.
Yet 'Islamic
faculty cell' example of Coll suggests a day when even the threat of collective
punishment will not be enough to obviate the WMD threat. With the proliferation
of knowledge and the increasing sophistication of commercially
available devices
a time will eventually come when small groups can build nuclear or biological
devices without state assistance. When private and personal WMD attacks become
possible deterrence will lose effectiveness entirely.

But the situation will be even more dangerous than Coll suggests.
Long before
a faculty lounge in Islamabad or Riyadh realizes it can build a bomb alone and
secretly, the same thought will have occurred to individuals in Tel Aviv, New
Delhi or Palo Alto. Any Islamic group that believes it can attack New York
deniably should convince itself that no similar group can nuke Mecca at the
height of the pilgrim season. In fact, the whole problem that Coll describes
should be generalized. The only thing worse than discovering that New York has
been destroyed by persons unknown is to find that Islamabad has been vaporized
by a group we've never heard of.

Perhaps in the long view of history it will be President Bush's
commitment to
"return humans to the moon by 2020 and mount a subsequent human
expedition to
Mars" that will prove prescient.